


Natural

by sky_blue_hightops



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Fear, Gen, Guilt, Heavy Angst, Spoilers, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-04
Updated: 2018-08-04
Packaged: 2019-06-21 02:37:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15547731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sky_blue_hightops/pseuds/sky_blue_hightops
Summary: Connor's life has been decision after decision, regret after regret. But the ability to die and stay dead presents him with yet another.





	Natural

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Imagine Dragons' Natural. TW for suicidal thoughts. Prompt was Connor feeling guilty/suicidal/just really bad in general post-deviancy.

Connor brushed his fingers over the cool grain of Hank's kitchen table. He had turned off all the lights in the house hours ago. The low hum of the dishwasher and dim chatter of the television had faded into the background long ago. Sumo was sleeping in the master bedroom.

His internal database counted down the seconds. Until what, he didn't know. Until Hank returned home, until Sumo begged for his attention, until his battery ran down? How long could he sit here, at this table, without moving? How long could he count down the seconds? His hands shook, gripping the object in them tightly. He was alone, and he didn't want to be.

Deviancy had brought emotions, good and bad. Good in the smiles that held meaning, in the first time he had laughed at one of Hank's awful jokes, in the light feeling in his chest whenever they walked past a dog on the way to the store. Good in peace, in hope, in contentment. Most of his days (after turning deviant, after the success of the revolution) consisted of good emotions.

But with the good came the bad. With his empathy, guilt. With his joy, fear.

On the bad days, remorse pulled at his limbs in the early hours of the morning, when he lay awake with nothing but his memory recall to keep him occupied. Staring at the ceiling, eyes blank, calculating. Every single choice he could have made differently sprawled in his mind, hundreds of thousands of barely-different outcomes eating him away until the sun was up, until it was hard to remember which reality he truly lived in. 

 _The thud of his fist into CyberLife-issued armor, the crack of a head against the steel walls of the elevator, the grunts of fragile humans that had been in his way. The cool glint of a gun, the blue glow of the elevator buttons. The sharp recoil of the gun in his hands. The pool of blood, red as his LED, red as danger. The panel of blood-splattered buttons._  He had killed two CyberLife guards, when he was newly-deviant and had no concept of  _death_ as anything but another event in humans' short lifespans. He had taken lives, he had ended living beings. Was he any better than CyberLife? Than the humans that had corralled and killed his kind? Regret fueled him to run reconstruction after reconstruction - could he have changed anything? Was there any other way? He didn't know. He didn't know, _hedidn'tknow_ -

He remembered the split-second decisions that had almost cost him dearly. _Hank, clinging to the edge of the roof. Hank, staring down the barrel of his counterpart's gun._ He remembered calculating the chance of survival. He remembered how the first had been merely a number; he remembered how the second had filled him with quiet terror. He used to decide purely on mathematical equations, on relevance to his mission. But his deviancy changed that, changed everything: there on the -49th floor, surrounded by dormant androids, quite literally holding the key to their survival as living beings in his hand, and making the choice between them and one Hank Anderson - suddenly the weary resignation in Hank's voice pulled on his new, vulnerable emotions more than completing a mission ever could. He had failed Hank once, and in the dim lights of CyberLife's sub-basement floors he realized he never wanted to do it again. Thousands of timelines, thousands of outcomes - Hank, alive ( _sad eyes, rough voice, memories of a snowy night_ ) or dead ( _red blood, oh, so red, still warm_ ) - Connor, ~~deactivated~~ dead ( **WARNING: LOW THIRIUM SUPPLY - WARNING: STRUCTURAL WOUNDS - WARNING: SHUTDOWN IMMINENT** ) or ~~functional~~ alive ( _scared, he knew what fear was now_ ). The timelines that had never occurred ( _would never occur_ , he vowed) still tugged at his thirium pump with sour guilt. Guilt was an awful feeling, he decided. It made him want to tear himself apart and figure out how to remove it permanently - _but_ , he wondered bitterly, _weren't these painful emotions what they had spent so long fighting for?_

The ceiling fan spun lazily, stirring up the dust in the room ( _he should get up and clean, should get up and do anything, he was entertaining dangerous thoughts_ ) and making his hair flutter loose and gentle in his eyes. He removed one hand from the object to brush the stray hairs back - his fingers hovered over his LED, felt the reminder of his inhumanity embedded in his temple. No doubt it was cycling red, the only outward indication of how unsafe he felt at his own hands; even his innermost safety processes knew this was a bad idea. ( _Get up and take Sumo for a walk. Wash the dishes. Pay attention to the television. Buy groceries._ ) He clutched tighter at the smooth, curved metal. Played with how it fit so snugly in his hands.

He wondered how permanent death applied to him. He could die now, certainly.  _ ~~I felt it die. Like I was dying. I was scared...~~  _His pump stuttered in his chest. What would it be like? He remembered the pain that came with blue blooming across the center of his shirt, remembered the pain of betrayal, examined the pain of his guilt, and wondered if that was what it felt like to die. Surely, dying would hurt less.

He tried to preconstruct how others would feel about his death, remembered the look in Hank's eyes when the lieutenant had confessed the story of Cole's death, and couldn't bring himself to finish the construction.

His thoughts were interrupted by fear again, as cold and unforgiving as the metal under his fingers, as painful and desperate as the guilt he wrestled with. This fear was not of losing significant figures in his life but of hurting them - how long would CyberLife processes rest latent under all the new branches in his protocols? He could still recall coming to his senses on that stage, finger trembling against the trigger, snow dusting his vision. Who would it be next time? He tried to imagine meeting Hank's or Sumo's eyes over his gun and felt...sick. Hatred (at himself, at how _susceptible_  he was, how _weak_ he was) burned deep and hard in his biocomponents.

 _Get up. Go take a walk. Forget this. This'll only end in more pain._ He did his best to ignore the cold metal under his fingertips, the cold chill in the air, the cold feeling of sudden apathy. Some feeling he didn't yet have a name for boiled over in him, spreading hot through his chest and face until he was gripping the object as hard as he physically could. 

He looked down at his clenched fists, smoothing his finger over the side of the object. Hank's old revolver rested in his hands. A tool for a task he wasn't sure he could carry out, a mission he wasn't sure he could complete. His fingertips caught the hammer, flicked it on. _Click_. Back off. _Click_. Over and over, clicking back and forth. In time with the seconds ticking down in his database. In time with his simulated heartbeat, with his simulated breaths. He had been on the other side of this gun once before, he recalled. _I self-test regularly._ How wrong he had been. How fallible.

It would be easy. Too easy. _Click_. He refused to scan the gun, determine the amount and location of bullets left. Hank would arrive home soon. _Click_. What if he found Connor-

He could see it now - the jingle of keys in the lock, the door creaking open, the blue liquid dripping off the table. He could see the look in Hank's eyes. He had seen it before. He could hear Sumo's whines. Pain, in his chest, at the thought. _Click_.

He lowered the gun slightly, glanced down at it. It was cocked. His finger twitched on the trigger.

Oh, how weak he was.

**Author's Note:**

> i like to refer to this one as 'i felt crappy so i wanted to write about someone feeling crappy'
> 
> ...i went crazy on the formatting sue me


End file.
